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Should Child Soldiers Get Amnesty Essay

713 Words3 Pages

Imagine being a young child in a once peaceful village but now a war zone. Your parents are gone, but hopefully not dead(it's what you tell yourself at night). But, it's not doing any good for your home. People are dying left & right all around you. So, you make your plan for survival very quick & decide to join the army. Only three days in and you’re killing. Just not your people- this is revenge for your home. Child Soldiers should NOT receive amnesty(political pardon) unless proven within a year or two of therapy. In an article by Sebastian Solorzano(Seb) which says how child soldiers don’t deserve amnesty, ‘Child Soldiers Should Not Receive Amnesty.’ When Child Soldiers go into the army, they are “often choosing to kill their own family to be accepted.” This is their conscious decision to shoot or stab their family members to just go into the war. With them killing their family members, what makes us think that they won’t hesitate to kill strangers who never spoke to them, never raised them- It’s just too much of a dangerous risk to take. But, was it really a conscious decision? As a child, would you have the mental capacity to KNOW what war is about? What is actually happening in the war- children could not possibly comprehend the entirety of the war without some …show more content…

“...Jordy isn’t much taller than the gun he carried as a child soldier. ‘It was a way to protect myself, and it was a way to survive.’ Said Jordy.” It was a way to survive. They may not have understood the war, but they needed a way to survive without getting killed and joining the nearest army was their only choice. Think about it: Would you rather be struggling to survive as a child with no family and no one to show you compassion or would you rather go into the army as a child and have some chance at survival with

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Also, according to the Invisible Children Association, “...child soldiers are often forced into fighting through false promises. They are also forced into fighting through drugs and alcohol.” This shows how they are forced and they think what they are doing is okay because they are brainwashed. These children are being misled and sometimes threatened to commit horrible acts, that they wouldn’t do if they knew what was happening. But these children were never taught what is right and wrong.

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“I joined the army really because of the loss of my family and starvation. I wanted to avenge the death of my family. I also had to get some food to survive, and the only way to do that was to be part of the army. It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it.” (Beah 199)

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In Anthem, by Ayn Rand, what was the Council of Vocations thinking when they made Equality 7-2521 a Street Sweeper? The Council of Vocations chose Equality 7-2521 to be a Street Sweeper, there are some reasons that could explain why. They do not want him to be in a place of power because they know he is smart, he broke a lot of laws while in school, and to teach him a lesson to make him just like his brothers. Did the Council of Vocations make Equality 7-2521 a Street Sweeper to keep him away from power? Equality 7-2521 was very smart, so much so that he was punished for not being equal to his brothers.

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How would you feel if you were recruited as a soldier during war? Since 2001, the participation of child soldiers has been reported in 21 on-going or recent armed conflicts in almost every region of the world. The importance of this is portrayed in Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone. The author believes that innocent kids should not be selected to fight as soldiers, lose their innocence killing people, witnessing violent scenes and suffer because of war.

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To a child in a country of war, life can change “rapidly in a matter of seconds and no one [has] any control over anything. [They have] yet to...implement survival tactics, which [is] what it came down to” (Beah 29). Children who become soldiers are given hardly any choice because their families are usually dead, and without the army they have no family or way to survive during the war. The book “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah tells the story of how Ishmael became a child soldier in Sierra Leone during the war.

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On DebateWise.org it is stated that some kids join because they live in poverty and will otherwise starve to death. They feel like they don’t have any choice but to join. Other times they are convinced being a soldier will be safer for them, that they will be safer when they’re the ones behind the gun, not in front of it. In Ishmael Beah’s “Long Way Gone” he describes how during the civil war in Sierra Leone, rebels would march into cities and chose the children who seemed the strongest. Many times the rebels would then force their newly recruited members to kill weaker civilians in the city.

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This quote shows that many of them don’t have any interest in being soldiers, so they don’t want to be violent. “They are easily manipulated.” (Gettleman) Since they are only kids, we shouldn’t expect them to be mature enough to think about what they are doing as soldiers. Besides, most child soldiers don’t

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Have you ever mentioned the subject of child soldiers in a standard conversation? Most likely not. Child soldiers are not an everyday discussion topic, but recently they have grown more and more popular. While in the past, “children were not particularly effective as front-line fighters since most of the lethal hardware was too heavy and cumbersome for them to manipulate” (unicef.org), weapons have become lighter, and younger infantries have followed suit. While childhoods usually don’t consist of shooting people, taking villages, and other awful acts of war, they can, and this physiologically impacts a child.

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“Most of the kids are forced into fighting”. This tell me that there were actually kids that were forced to join so they can fight. “ Their choices are minimum they are just following orders,rather than making their own choices.” This tells me that they might be afraid to make their own choices that’s why they do what they are asked to because if they don’t do what they are asked to they might get killed. “Children are forced by commanders through false promises,drugs, and things which you can’t even imagine, to kill innocent civilians, other children and even their own families.”

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Although this might seem unrealistic, it is a reality for thousands of pre-adolescents around the world. Many places such as Sierra Leone have recruited hundreds of children to fight in wars. Some families die due to the violence, while other children are taken or come willingly and are brainwashed and drugged into thinking that what they are doing is normal. They refer to their commanders as father

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According to “Armed and Underage”, “What’s more, children are often considered the perfect weapon: They are easily manipulated, intensely loyal, fearless, and most important, in endless supply.” Because children can be persuaded or forced to do what the military wants they will do anything because they are afraid to disappoint the adults. “Children are often desired as recruits because they can be easily intimidated and indoctrinated. They lack the mental maturity and judgement to express consent or to fully understand the implications of their actions...and are pushed by the adult commanders into perpetrating atrocities” (Somalia Child Soldiers facing war crimes). Since children do not have a fully developed mind, the adults can mold the children into anything they want them to be and in this case, killers.

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An unhealthy obsession with guns, being drugged to make killings seem normal, and being undoubtedly loyal to commanders is only part of what a child soldier is. Child soldiers can be dangerous and make up many armies in war-torn countries. In much of the world, usually in unstable countries, when conflict breaks out, children can quickly be swept up and put on the front lines to fight. Children may carry ten-pound guns and use bullets twice the size of their fingers. Some children are old enough to understand what they are doing, and others have no idea.

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Have you ever imagined growing up on a life of drugs, war, crime, and seeing things that many adults won’t dare to ever see? In many countries around the world, this is what many children have to deal with. There is an occurring issue of people across Africa and parts of Asia using children as soldiers in war. They act and take upon the roles of real combatants, causing the people of the public to act in different ways. It’s been well documented that these children have used guns and war tactics, and committed various illegal and illicit acts of violence.

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1422 Words | 6 Pages

Assignment page Video Where many children all over the world merrily and freely live under the protection of the law, for others, this is a distant reality, they live in a world where they’re battling poverty, stripped of their childhood and basic human rights are expunged, they’re the innocent victims of conflict, and war is made to seem their one and only duty, not to mention that these are children no more than 10 years of age. They are put into a situation where it’s to kill or be killed. The United Nations defines a child soldier as, “Any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity.” Since the past 15 years, child soldiers are being used in almost every region of the world. Unlike most children, who go to school, they’re abducted from their families and forced into becoming a child soldier, where living conditions are beyond imaginable.

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